You’re Gonna Die

On Wednesday night, I was talking about death with my friend on the phone. I don’t really know how it came up, but we were wondering what it meant to die. My friend doesn’t really have a clear belief on what happens to us when we die. He grew up in a Christian home, but I’m not sure what he believes now. He was saying something to the effect that when we die, it’s like we won’t even have thoughts anymore. We won’t be able to even think about the fact that we don’t have thoughts because our brains will be gone. Then we started talking about the idea of heaven and what part of us will go to heaven. If it’s our souls, then will we remember anything? Maybe when we get our resurrected bodies one day we’ll remember this life. We hung up because we were both really tired and talking about things we will never understand, and I didn’t have a very restful sleep. Early Thursday morning I had a dream that this life is all there was. And when we died, we were gone forever. We are conscious for 75 years (if we’re lucky), and then we are gone forever. The dream seemed so real, and I woke up feeling despair. I don’t believe that when we die, we cease to exist. Too much in my life has happened to show the reality of God and Christ. But last night, as I was trying to sleep, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I am going to die. I will die one day. Everyone will die one day. We joke about death, and at the same time, cry about it. I think one reason we cry so much when a loved one dies is because we are scared knowing that death is going to happen to us. I know it’s morbid, but it’s real. All my crazy thoughts of death have put so much into perspective for me. I realized that I worry about so much stuff that doesn’t matter. One thing that I’ve really been praying about the past couple weeks has been marriage. I really want to get married, and I’m afraid that it may never happen. As my friends meet people and get serious and consider marriage, I feel like I’m left behind and lonely. I worry about what people will think of me if I say certain things, and I worry about what I wear, and I worry about everything. It all seems so stupid when I add death into the equation. Last night I was trying to stop thinking about the fact that time keeps passing and I’m getting closer to death everyday, but then I realized that death is reality. It’s one of the very few things in life that I am sure will happen. It’s really stupid of me to leave it out of the equation of my life because it’s already there whether I want to see it or not. This morning as I was drinking my coffee and getting ready, I was listening to Phil Wickham’s “Divine Romance.” I realized that almost everything in this life distracts me from what’s important which is the relationship between humans and God. I realized that death will happen, but even though I die, I will still have the love of my life: God. Even though human relationships are very important, they all end because we’re all going to die, but my relationship with God is always there. It makes me wonder why I try to invest my entire being into my friendships that aren’t really that great compared to my relationship with God. I’m not saying that I don’t need people, because I desperately do need people. My relationship with God shouldn’t depend on my relationships with people, it should be the other way around.

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One Response to You’re Gonna Die

Lets agree for a moment that the individual must be destroyed through the process of death as the process of birth created the individual.

Does the destruction of the individual mean a destruction of the ‘biengness’ or soul that was associated with the individual? I don’t know, but the destruction of the individual could simply be the separation of the soul from the limitations of a single entity… a return to from where the individual came.

If God marks the line where existence and lack thereof (he separated that which exists from that which didn’t as a creator), then death might merely be a return of the soul to the whole from where it came, free from the limitations of a single entity. And end of thought, yes, but the most indivisible essence would remain as it transcends the boundaries of both birth and death in effect becoming once again a part of God.

The sense of self may be destroyed (in this case), but not the self. Or maybe not. Death is an interesting phenomenon.